Computers, and their users, are commonly linked together via communication networks, such as the Internet. Email transmissions between users provide a method of transmitting from an issuer to a recipient data, stored as a file, which is attached as an attachment to the email and sent directly with it.
Known methods of attaching a file to an email message have many disadvantages, originating from size restrictions of attachments for emails. Furthermore, these methods for transmitting email are not secure, do not provide transmission guarantees, do not provide real-time transmission and have changing attachment size limits. In particular, when a “large” attachment is provided with an email or when the email contains sensitive information, current email transmission techniques do not sufficiently addresses these issues. The present email transmission technology may be likened to a postal service offering to deliver only small postcards that anyone in the postal office can read while in transit.
Presently, most email servers have set size limits on emails that are sent to, from or relayed by such servers. The limitations vary greatly from server to server, with limits being as low as less than 1 megabyte to 10 megabytes or more. Given these varying limits, it is not uncommon for users of email to send an email with a large file attachment, and then having that email rejected by the recipient server as to being too large to process. Under some conditions the email issuer may not even receive a rejection notice, or such notice may arrive hours after the email was first sent.
Further, an email is often sent or relayed through third party email servers where it may be intercepted and captured by unauthorized parties. Since the vast majority of email being sent is in plain text, unless the file attachment is previously password protected or encrypted, all information contained in the email is susceptible to being intercepted without the knowledge of either the issuer or recipient of the email.
Recently, Virtual Private Networks (“VPNs”) have been deployed which provide the ability to transmit large volumes of data securely over the Internet. Many VPNs provide a variety of capital-intensive solutions to companies that wish to give users access from known remote personal computers (“PCs”) to an internal corporate local area network (“LAN”) over the Internet. However, such VPN access lacks the ease of use and universality of existing email interfaces. Further, current VPN implementations are limited by the security barriers erected on the Internet to protect a user's PC and an internal LAN from viruses, hackers and other security risks. These barriers include firewalls, network address translation (“NAT”) systems and related security structures that an average user of a VPN or the Internet cannot control. Thus, current VPN implementations focus on enabling network access from known remote locations (typically employees' PC's) to a company's internal LAN by reconfiguring a number of security barriers, such as a corporate firewall, and installing specialized software or hardware, but do not provide universal communications between users and the secured PC's.
As a result, although unsecured and limited in size, email remains the preferred means of data transmission for corporate Internet users in communications to external users, such as business partners, suppliers, or clients.
Hence there is a need for a flexible, user friendly and efficient system and method to transmit file attachments of an email securely across a computer network, such as the Internet.